The folks at Capital Economics write in with this gloomy tidbit: “The further fall in house prices in the first quarter means that, on the Case-Shiller index, prices have now fallen by more than they did during the Great Depression.”

By their calculations, prices are now down 33% from their 2006 peak, compared with the 31% decline during the Depression.

The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.

The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn.

How Bad Could It Get?

The above-quoted Wall Street Journal also notes:

The remarkable thing about this downturn is that even though prices have fallen by more than in the Great Depression, the bottom has yet to be reached. We think that prices will fall by at least a further 3% this year, and perhaps even further next year.

The co-creator of the leading house price index - Robert Shiller - says that he is worried housing prices could decline for another five years. He noted that Japan saw land prices decline for 15 consecutive years up to 2006.

Indeed, it is possible that housing prices may never return to their peak bubble levels. See this, this and this.

The leading monetary economist told the Wall Street Journal that this was not a liquidity crisis, but an insolvency crisis. She said that Bernanke is fighting the last war, and is taking the wrong approach. Nobel economist Paul Krugman and leading economist James Galbraith agree. They say that the government's attempts to prop up the price of toxic assets no one wants is not helpful.

The Bank for International Settlements – often described as a central bank for central banks (BIS) – slammed the easy credit policy of the Fed and other central banks, the failure to regulate the shadow banking system, "the use of gimmicks and palliatives", and said that anything other than (1) letting asset prices fall to their true market value, (2) increasing savings rates, and (3) forcing companies to write off bad debts "will only make things worse".

***

David Rosenberg [former chief economist for Merrill Lynch] writes:

Our advice to the Obama team would be to create and nurture a fiscal backdrop that tackles this jobs crisis with some permanent solutions rather than recurring populist short-term fiscal goodies that are only inducing households to add to their burdensome debt loads with no long-term multiplier impacts. The problem is not that we have an insufficient number of vehicles on the road or homes on the market; the problem is that we have insufficient labour demand.

Indeed, as I pointed out in April, unemployment is so bad that 1.2 million households have "disappeared", as people move out of their own houses and move in with friends or family.

Should governments feel it necessary to take direct actions to alleviate debt burdens, it is crucial that they understand one thing beforehand. If asset prices are unrealistically high, they must fall. If savings rates are unrealistically low, they must rise. If debts cannot be serviced, they must be written off.

***

Baker said last November that the government hasn't really helped homeowners, but has really been helping out the big banks instead:

The big talk in Washington these days is "helping homeowners". Unfortunately, what passes for help to homeowners in the capitol might look more like handing out money to banks anywhere else.

***

So, who benefits from "helping homeowners" in this story? Naturally the big beneficiaries are the banks. If the government pays for a mortgage modification where the homeowner is still paying more for the mortgage than they would for rent, then the bank gets a big gift from the government, but the homeowner is still coming out behind.

***

There are simple, low-cost ways to help homeowners who were victims of the housing bubble and lending sharks.... But this would mean hurting the banks rather than giving them taxpayer dollars, and we still don't talk about hurting banks in Washington DC.

The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with "the system," "the economy," and "ordinary Americans."

***

Instead of fixing the real problems with our economy or genuinely helping struggling homeowners, the government has made everything worse by trying to artificially prop up asset prices in a way that only helps the big banks.

An aggressive combination of reflation by the Fed and restructuring of the housing and banking sectors is the way to restore US economic growth, but you won’t hear about restructuring large banks from adherents of the neo-[i.e. faux] Keynsian faith.

***

Instead of embracing a permanent state of inflation, as has been the case in the US since the 1970s, we need to deflate the bubble and start again. It is not too late for President Obama and Congress to restructure the US financial system, fix the housing market and create the conditions for true economic growth.

Lest you think I am unfairly criticizing Keynesian economics, I pointed out last year:

"Deficit doves" - i.e. Keynesians like Paul Krugman - say that unless we spend much more on stimulus, we'll slide into a depression. And yet the government isn't spending money on the types of stimulus that will have the most bang for the buck ... let alone rebuilding America's manufacturing base. See this, this and this. [Indeed, as Steve Keen demonstrated last year, it is the American citizen who needs stimulus, not the big banks.]

4 comments:

Really, it's hilarious that this is even being discussed at all. Was it a bubble? Of course it was. Everyone knows it was. Will prices return to their bubble levels? Yes, but the way it will happen will be the Detroit Way. The housing stock will be reduced. Governments will cover the banks on this end too. And yes, that means that there will be many more americans without houses. Most likely we will see massive dislocations, multitudes of homeless, and poverty at indescribable levels. Or, rather, we won't 'see' it. It will be there all around us, but we won't see it.

See, that's really the story behind the story. How folks see the current situation depends on how they see the last three decades, since the Reagan years. Carter's 'malaise' speech posed a question: whither America? Reagan provided the answer. The answer was the screeching rise of predatory capital, both domestically and globally. Volker started it all, by knocking everyone down several pegs with a vicious recession, a monetary policy that, as vicious as it was domestically, was truly savage on a global level.

Then the glorious recovery began. And we all pretended not to notice that suddenly, we were all working harder for less. Almost overnight, women in the workforce became a necessity, not a choice. But we didn't notice. It took two incomes to run a household. But we didn't notice. Inflation began to run away, but because you could buy cheaper and cheaper goods at Walmart (so cheap that it made no sense to fix anything anymore), no one noticed. The roof over your head, the education for your children, the medical care ... all these things began to skyrocket in cost ... but you could get loans ... more and more loans. And you could work more jobs. During the Clinton era, two jobs wasn't enough for a household anymore. Now Mom had a second job at night. Preachers railed about the 'breakdown of the American Family', but they always attributed this to the moral turpitude of ordinary people, who were having to work harder and harder just to keep things going, AND WERE DOING IT!

Finally people lost all hope of keeping up. That's when the real loan frenzy started. Nothing made sense anymore, and there was no way that things could work out that anyone could really imagine. The future was just unimaginable. But economists said that the economy would keep expanding, without industries or jobs, because of sophisticated financing, and a second mortgage WOULD help with Sally's college expenses, or Dad's medical care, or the extra car that the extra jobs necessitated, and so maybe you could keep the household going, and surely the economists had to be right about how bright the future surely was ...

And so we've been living in an economy that has been in a death spiral for decades, but - with a lot of help from Hollywood - we've imagined ourselves to be in a completely different place, in an economy revanant.We were experiencing the Glory that was Rome. We had our pride. And now we continue to refuse to open our eyes. We still have more guns than anyone else, more prisons than anyone else, and we still have the Dream Factory.

As Peter Schiff recently stated, "This is the end of the beginning." The real economic drop off is just about to kick in and it will be brutal. As Celente has said, there will be riots. People should be afraid of what is about to happen the next 5-10 years.

It seems we just just cannot to go to that place of the only real explanation for the whole collapse - it is mostly by design. Lots of doors will open to the actual reality of the mechanisms of this pillaging if one is simply willing to look at the obvious.

Recoveries with negative job growth? Only actual jobs being created are in the govt sector that creates nothing but endless debt? Housing market return or bubble? Are we really still spending time on these types of discussions? I apologize in advance at my tone but it is just too disgusting to me that much of the country and beyond are still propping up these frauds at this incredibly late juncture.

The reality is when the dust settles, the banks and big corps will own most of the real assets on the cheap. The usual suspects that create ridiculous wars, and fiat currency ponzi systems are stealing everyone blind. Anyone that doesnt call it like it is either benefiting from it, afraid for their own head, or simply has no clue.

Inflation on everything that is necessary for Americans to survive has already risen massively. Only ridiculous CPI equations that play hide the weenie and exclude food, housing and fuel do not spell this out.

As necessities rise beyond reach, and no one has a job to be able to afford a home regardless the price, it will be clear who has won this game and how.

Do we really think that all this crushing debt that has destroyed the third world(now most real assets are becoming owned by the bankers and big corps), and is now being wielded upon the west in similar fashion was not by design? Decades of duping the less fortunate has emboldened the global governance crowd to crush the western world.

It is criminal that it is not being called out by name by the "journalism" community. It is the biggest, most pervasive, most violent, most destructive economic pillaging the world has ever seen. Shame on us all for not reporting reality.

The IMF announced they are prepared to provide $100T more credit to markets! Yippee. Anyone listening?! Credit is quite synonomous with DEBT last time I checked. Crushing, stifling, enslaving debt. They also announced they are ready to role out their new currency, the Bancor.

How are those Greece pillagings, I mean bailouts, treating everyone? 2nd default in a blink? Wow, the bankers and politicians must really know what they are doing to have set up an immediate second default with their master bailout plans. You bet they do...they are now owning Greece.

Contrasting the last depression with today:

1. There was very little state debts then, now massive.2. There was reasonable Fed Govt debt, now it breaks calculators.3. There was not an estimated >$200T in exotic investment vehicles like derivatives (more money out of thin air). How do we resolve what some estimate is possibly more than double that number? It has to wash out at some point.4. Consumers had very little debt. Now >$14T.5. The US had manufacturing as great as the world has seen...now has very little thus cannot build itself out of debt.6. Did not have unlimited money printing of a currency backed by...NOTHING.

Hey, I have a solution-a centralized global banking system. That way we could hand over all sovereignty right now!

All empires die, and they always die from within. Only fools would think this one would be any different. We have every symptom of the death rattle of a former empire - rampant corruption, wealth consolidated in a tiny few's hands(we have more income disparity than Egypt and >30 other countries), wars and the coliseum to distract the sheep, numerous attorneys perpetuating the game, justice system that only serves the cartels....etc etc.

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